Fox and Friends: This new smartphone app proves that polls are wrong and Trump is winning

With Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s poll numbers in free-fall, some on the right are having trouble coping with reality. On Tuesday morning, the crew at Fox and Friends turned to an anonymous smartphone app called Zip for reassurance about the outcome of the 2016 presidential race.

According to Media Matters, Zip’s founders would have you believe that the real reason former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is winning in the polls is because people are showing “a reverse Bradley effect,” not answering pollsters honestly because they don’t want to be judged for supporting Trump. Zip’s anonymous question and answer format, they said, allows people to show their Trump support without the stigma.

Co-host Steve Doocy said, “Hillary Clinton tops Donald Trump in the latest national polls,but if you ask voters anonymously who they like, the results are a lot different. And evidence of that can be found through an app called Zip, the question and answer app.”

Doocy asked Zip’s creator Alanna Markey, “OK, so your results are a lot different than the — what we see of the RealClearPolitics average…Alanna, explain why the answer — your results are so much different than the polls we’ve been seeing.”

Markey explained that Zip is not a polling device, but “an anonymous conversation that’s happening nationwide. And we have users that are over 13 across the U.S., exclusively in the U.S. So because it’s conversational we feel like that’s why our results are really so accurate and representative of how people are talking.”

Ric Militi, also a Zip representative said, “It’s important to note that everyone who answered these questions are probably over 18. Because that’s how it was sent out.”

Markey and Militi said that each Zip poll reaches around 100,000 anonymous users, which Doocy took as evidence that it’s more accurate than a conventional political poll, saying, “Right exactly. A random poll that somebody might put out there, they might ask 500, 1,000, something like that. So you got lots more people.”

Doocy went on, “Alanna, here’s another question. ‘Polls say people don’t like Trump: Be honest, do you like him or dislike him?’ And 60 percent, about, say, ‘Polls are wrong, love him or like him.’ Do you think part of this is because your app is anonymous and people don’t have tell to a person, ‘I like Donald Trump’ because they might judge the person who is doing the talking?”

“One hundred percent,” Markey replied. “And we’ve actually had some users and people weigh in that it’s almost like a reverse Bradley effect. That’s something that’s been coming up pretty recently. So we do think because Zip is an anonymous forum, people don’t feel that fear of repercussion.”

“And,” she continued, “there’s no room for bullying or commentary. So they really are expressing their honest opinion.”

“OK so if the election were held today, according to the Zip app, Donald Trump would win, according to Alanna and Ric,” Doocy said.

The views echo 2012 “unskewed polls” phenomenon in which conservatives decided that all current political polling methods are flawed because they told them that Republican nominee Mitt Romney was losing. Romney supporters chose to rally around a poll model that gave them the results they wanted, but which was ultimately wrong.

About the Author

David Ferguson is an editor at Raw Story. He was previously writer and radio producer in Athens, Georgia, hosting two shows for Georgia Public Broadcasting and blogging at Firedoglake.com and elsewhere. He is currently working on a book.